A Contrastive Study on Korean Shape-Based Classifiers and Chinese Measure Words: With a Focus on One-Dimensional Shape Features

This study aims to investigate the correspondence patterns between Korean one-dimensional shape-based classifiers and their Chinese counterparts from a contrastive semantic perspective. It focuses on the Korean classifiers ‘가닥 ∙ 개비 ∙ 줄기’ and the Chinese measure words ‘条 /丝 ∙ 根 ∙ 道/股’, using data from contemporary Korean and Chinese corpora and standard dictionaries. The analysis is based on a qualitative contrastive approach grounded in the semantic features of extension, linearity, slenderness, and unitizability. The results show that the two languages share a common perceptual basis in one-dimensional shape categorization, but differ in the organization and prioritization of semantic subfeatures. Korean tends to maintain broader upper-level categories, whereas Chinese differentiates classifier choice according to finer-grained semantic features, resulting in more distributed correspondence patterns. These findings indicate that classifier selection reflects language-specific semantic categorization rather than simple lexical equivalence, and suggest that contrastive analysis of classifier systems can contribute to a more precise understanding of semantic categorization in Korean and Chinese.